Cloud

Video calls are handy, but you lose that sense of presence. To make remote meetups a bit more personal, Microsoft has unveiled Mesh, a “mixed reality” platform that lets people work and play together as virtual avatars overlaid on real-world spaces.

Home to constant turbulent weather and the Great Red Spot – a storm bigger than Earth – Jupiter is the storm capital of the solar system. Now NASA’s Juno mission has discovered two new quirks of these storms – shallow lightning and “mushball” hail.

Using polarized light, astronomers have detected signs of cloud bands in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf far beyond the solar system. It turns out that these gassy giants have a similar appearance to Jupiter, and the same kind of wild weather.

In a world first, researchers have conducted a cloud-brightening trial as a way of protecting fragile corals in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, to see whether reflecting some of the Sun’s energy away could help limit damage due to climate change.

This year, Dropbox doubled the available storage available to Plus subscribers from 1 TB to 2 TB, but with it came a US$2 hike to the monthly subscription, up to $11.99 per month. For many home users, 2 TB is way more than is needed.

Martian clouds could have an alien origin, according to a newly-published paper. The study suggests that mid-level clouds form above the Red Planet due to a phenomenon called "meteor smoke," which occurs when space debris is shredded upon entering the Martian atmosphere.

Most home robots aren’t particularly customizable. Now robotics startup Ohbot has unveiled its newest creation Picoh, a blank slate of a robot that can be programmed to do basically whatever you want it to do.

Aircraft have been known to mess with the clouds as they pass through or over them. A new study has found that planes could be boosting rainfall and snowfall by up to 10 times, and examined the microphysics behind it.

Hot on the heels of Google’s announcement last week of Project Stream, Microsoft has now revealed its own plans for a video game streaming service. Dubbed Project xCloud, the service would allow players to jump into an Xbox One game on basically any device – be it a TV, PC, or even a smartphone.

The unusually cold year of 1816 has been linked to one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history, and now we may know how. A new paper explains how electrified ash from the eruption could have “short-circuited” the Earth’s ionosphere and triggered the “Year Without A Summer.”

​Christiaan van Heijst is an airline pilot with over a decade's experience flying everything from small Turboprops to massive Boeing 747s. He's also a photographer able to capture spectacular images from his privileged perspective at 35,000 ft.

​An important arm of exoplanet research involves the study of the atmospheres that surround these distant worlds. The molecules they hold can reveal valuable insights into what kind conditions can be found there – along with ones that cannot.